Blair's blues

Tony Blair's blues

The downcast former British prime minister— and close friend of the Clintons — fears that their shared brand of centrism may be dead.

By Glenn Thrush

Tony Blair isn’t sure the center can hold – hell, he isn’t even certain that centrists like Hillary Clinton or himself have a viable future in Western politics.

“It’s a very open question whether the type of politics I represent really has had its day or not,” said the 63-year-old former Labour prime minister, speaking to me on Monday in his London office for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast.

“There were times when I was growing up in politics and when I was prime minister when I had complete confidence in my own ability, just as a professional, to predict the course of politics. The last few years have caused me to question [that],” he added – referring to the rise of hard-left upstarts Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. and Bernie Sanders in the U.S.

This is not the boyish, optimistic “Bambi” who walked, doe-eyed, into 10 Downing St. 19 years ago – a polished politician whose popularity reached an astounding 93 percent after he anointed the late Diana the “People’s Princess.” The last few years have been trying times for a deft maestro of the middle, a man who dominated British politics from 1997 to 2007 – but crashed after joining in lockstep with George W. Bush to advocate the invasion of Iraq.

The past six months in particular have brought four shocks that undermine Blair's legacy and agenda: The rise of the crusty Corbyn to the apex of a militantly leftist Labour, a Brexit vote he viewed as a disaster, a scathing Parliamentary commission report that faulted his presentation of unsubstantiated intelligence as a justification attacking Iraq – and the rise of Donald Trump, which he views as a global harbinger of something sinister.

In a frank, at times self-scouring 40-minute conversation, Blair questioned the political viability of the pragmatic approach to politics that propelled him to power with Bill Clinton in the 1990s, a trans-Atlantic partnership whose depth (and shallowness) was recently revealed in a series of phone call transcripts showing the two swapping political advice, serious consultation about Vladimir Putin and jokes about bananas.

But he also singled out Hillary Clinton – who has positioned herself as a stout progressive in the Sanders mold – as the last, best hope for centrism at a time when it is beset by extremists on both sides, egged on by social media he believes has had a “revolutionary” impact on politics, and not in a good way.

“Hillary Clinton,” he said, with a grin over his coffee cup, “is the Democrat nominee and, at least if the polls are correct, she has a fair chance of winning.”

Blair said he remains in communication with both Clintons. He provided then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with inside intel on his conversations with Mideast leaders when he served as an envoy to the region – and reportedly sought her help in securing a top job at the European Union. More often the exchanges have been less formal, and Blair told me they have talked, from time to time, about how to survive politically during the present era of “protest” politics.

“They're thinking about it the whole time,” Blair said. “I mean, there's no two smarter people in politics. Of course. this is the No. 1 issue: How do you respond to what are genuine anxieties and fears but come up with a response that has real integrity? And real integrity means an answer. It doesn't just mean -- it doesn't mean riding the anger. And this is very difficult to do. … This is why I'm reevaluating the whole time but I haven't come to the conclusion that centrist politics is wrong or dead. … I think it's very much alive but it needs to be given a renewal, a revival, and a muscularity which it presently lacks.”

In the U.S., both candidates claimed the June 23 Brexit vote is an augur of things to come. Trump (characteristically) has taken credit for predicting it; Clinton has used it as a cautionary tale of anger-fueled, self-destructive irrationality. Blair, arguably the most passionate English proponent of the U.S.-U.K. “special relationship” since Winston Churchill, sees it the other way 'round.

“What always happens in my experience is that people always think American politics is very different [from British politics] but usually it is apredictor of what happens in the politics elsewhere," he says.

When I ask him if he thinks Trump’s rise is abetting the emergence of far-right populist movements in Austria, Britain, France, Spain and elsewhere, he nods in agreement. “Yes. To a degree, because it gives people the sense that what they feel is being felt elsewhere.”

As for Brexit, Blair says the new government should “rule nothing out” – including a second up-or-down referendum, despite the new Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May’s commitment to seeing the vote through. “I think this Conservative government believes that it can't contain the unity of the Conservative Party without delivering Brexit, but … 48 percent, 16 million people that voted to remain, and we don't yet know what we're being offered,” Blair said. “I understand why there's parts of the right-wing media and the Conservative Party who want to shut this debate down, but we're a free country. I don't think we should shut it down.”

Blair has said he supports Clinton, but he’s loath to jump into U.S. politics – for good reason: Barack Obama’s support for the “remain” side of the Brexit vote was viewed as foreign meddling, and backfired badly. But he clearly doesn’t like Trump – (employing the words “dangerous” and “prejudice” to describe Trump-ish movements) and likened the GOP nominee’s anti-Muslim statements to British groups who threaten immigrants. “It’s clear some of these politicians are playing to prejudice,” Blair added.

Blair tenses up – stiffens in his chair -- when I raise his hawkishness on Iraq, and the breach of trust it represented to many British voters. The Chilcot report, which hit him hard for overstating the threat Saddam Hussein posed in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 and 2004, prompted a whole new round of Blair bashing, including a call to cull the report for evidence of war crimes.

He has taken responsibility, time and again, for the mistakes made in the build-up to the invasion, but has been equally vehement about acting in good faith. Rather than debate the details of the report (litigated at length by Blair during a marathon news conference), I asked Blair to addressing the damage wrought by the war on public trust in government – and whether his actions dampened public resolve to intervene militarily in other crises like Syria or Libya.

“That reluctance is not really derived from the trust issue. It's derived from the difficulty issue,” he shot back. “You can debate trust, but the thing that is most important about it is that it's -- it showed people that if you intervene in these circumstances, where radical Islamism is going to be a factor, it's going to be very, very tough. And you can talk about Iraq, but actually, people learned the same lesson from Afghanistan.”

It’s striking, nonetheless, that while Bill Clinton remains immensely popular (even as his wife moves well to his left on trade, law enforcement, gay marriage and welfare reform), Blair remains trapped in the political purgatory of his Iraq actions.

And that’s the uncrowning irony of his ten years in the Special Relationship. His ideology and political style was shaped by his symbiosis with the Clintons, but his legacy is ball-and-chained to Bush, who led him through the burning gates of Baghdad.

In one of their phone chats from 2000, released earlier this year, Bill Clinton warns Blair about Bush. "Bush is a skilled politician, but he is not ready to be president, maybe not ever, certainly not now" says Clinton – before assuring his British friend that Al Gore would succeed him.

Blair told me he didn’t recall the conversation – but said he didn’t agree with Clinton’s negative assessment of Bush anyway.

“No,” he said when I asked him if Bush was unfit to be commander-in-chief. “No, he had gone through a long preparation as governor [of Texas], so no.”